SOURCE: "Uncertainties of the Poet," in London Review of Books, Vol. 14, No. 12, June 25, 1992, pp. 22-3.

In the excerpt below, Tredell argues that the poems collected in An African Elegy are better suited for public oration than the printed page.

Violence, and the resistance to it, are important themes in Ben Okri's An African Elegy: but his declamatory mode largely proscribes subtle registrations like those of [John] Burnside. Okri's greatest public exposure as a poet came on the 1991 Booker Prize night, when he read what is now the title poem of this collection; that public reading, indeed, prompted this volume's publication. But a poetry effective on the podium can seem doubtful on the printed page. Okri often deals with some of the most serious of public themes: above all, the sufferings and conflicts of the post-colonial world, whether 'post-colonial' is understood to apply to the formerly colonised countries or...